Grand Cru Raises €8.5 Million, Releases Supernauts In Test Countries

More money is getting pumped into Helsinki’s gaming ecosystem – Grand Cru picked up €8.5 million to continue their development of Supernauts. The funding round was led by Idinvest, followed by Qualcomm Ventures and Nokia Growth Parnters. We’e learned the game has been released for testing purposes in New Zealand and a few other countries, and you can find a gameplay video below the fold. Luckily, this suggests Supernats will be coming to iPads and iPhones around the world sometime soon.

Building resources involves using machines of various kinds to create blocks and refine those blocks into other blocks. Think taking logs and making wood, or roofing blocks. Each block has a relative value in the game and can be sold in a market, or used to custom build within the players space.

Each time a block is placed, status points are awarded that unlock other items in the game and allow more complex things to be built. They also expand the playing field to multiple locations.

We’re glad the New Zealand preview suggests the game will be coming out very soon, because we’re running out of the vocabulary or word combinations to express we’re excited about Grand Cru’s game since the company has kept us speculating about what they’re working on for two years. They first popped up on our radar in May of 2011, when they announced a funding round by Helsinki’s Lifeline Ventures. The game screenshots look awesome, but we’ve seen roughly the same ones passed around since March of 2012 when they announced the game title, but now with a UI interface.

I’ve been impatient with wanting to get my hands on Supernauts, but CEO Markus Pasula’s strategy has been to release the best game possible whenever it’s ready, citing that they’ve been working on camera controls for the last 6 months. It feels like a long development process, but in their defense there aren’t a lot of 3D casual games out on the market, and bringing new controls to a mass audience could make or break the game.

The company only has 25 employees and says they’re going to hire slowly, much like Supercell’s strategy, giving them plenty of runway on this €8.5 million. Let’s hope we get a local release soon!